Mesa Verde, Petrified Forest, Isle Royale, Sequoia and Kings Canyon

Yes, a big update for you as I’ve created five new park pages in the last week. While some are a bit bare bones for now, others I was able to flesh out with a variety of maps.

Mesa Verde National Park mapFor Mesa Verde Maps, so far I have four uploaded: the main park unigrid map as well as three detail maps showing specific park locations and the various hiking trails, viewpoints, and ruins in each area.

Petrified Forest National Park mapMy Petrified Forest Maps haul is a bit weak so far with just two maps – the main park brochure map and a regional map showing the surrounding area. I’m hoping to find some more later.

Isle Royale National Park mapI haven’t found much yet for Isle Royale Maps either, but the main park map sure is a beauty – it’s one of the nicest looking ones so far. I’m beginning to think that maybe I’m just biased and inherently find any map with lots of blue to look superior to the others. But that’s not fair to the parks not near large bodies of water!

Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park mapI had a conundrum with maps for Sequoia National Park and Kings Canyon National Park. The two parks are actually managed together as one – effectively it is one national park, with one website, staff, administration, etc., called Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park(s). However, visitors typically don’t pick up on this – as far as the average person knows, it’s “Sequoia National Park” and “Kings Canyon National Park.” So how should I create the pages? In the end, I decided to just create nearly identical pages for both, repeating the same content on each of them, although presented differently. I felt like this would make the most sense to web viewers – I imagined some confused viewer wondering “Where’s Kings Canyon National Park?”, not knowing that it was actually listed under “S.” So hopefully two pages will make most sense for people, though it’ll be more work for me to update two instead of just one.

I made some other minor changes over the last week – some new maps on Big Bend Maps and also for Joshua Tree Maps.

Crater Lake and Wind Cave

Now that a lot of the “big” parks are finished, I’m working my way through some of the less-visited parks. At this point I don’t have quite as many maps for them, but I’m sure I’ll find more later to upload.

Crater Lake National Park mapThe Crater Lakes map page currently just has the two maps from the park brochure. I haven’t found any other public domain maps yet, which is unfortunate, although the official park map is pretty well designed! One of the best-looking brochure maps I’ve come across so far.

Wind Cave National Park older tour mapI’ve got started on Wind Cave maps with some cool maps of the cave interior, along with the park brochure maps. The maps of Wind Cave interior put the Carlsbad Caverns maps page to shame; it’s too bad similar public-domain maps of Carlsbad Caverns don’t seem to exist.

Joshua Tree and Denali are up

After fighting off a bit of the flu lately, I’ve got some new pages up.

Joshua Tree National Park simple mapThe Joshua Tree maps page took quite a while, but I got 20 maps posted, which I’m quite happy with. The maps I posted are all from the National Park Service website, although many of them have never existed in GIF or JPG formats until I created them and posted them here. So I’m happy I was able to create something new for this site.

Denali National Park mapThe Denali National Park maps page is mostly completed, although I hope to add new maps later; the NPS website didn’t have as much as I had hoped. I may need to find maps elsewhere to supplement the NPS ones. Still, the official park map is quite nice (big PDF size!) and I like the Denali Park Road map as well.

Rocky Mountain and Carlsbad Caverns complete

I took a bit of a break from adding new parks over the holidays, but I’m back and have some new updates.

Rocky Mountain National Park mapI’ve got 17 park maps uploaded on the new Rocky Mountain National Park map page. There’s some pretty nice trail and backcountry maps; in particular I really like the backcountry campsite map, which is super helpful for backpacking trip planning. Unfortunately, I don’t think the trail maps are detailed enough for good planning.

Carlsbad Caverns National Park mapSo far the Carlsbad Caverns map page is pretty lacking. I was only able to dig up one free public-domain map of the park. It seemed silly to even put the page up for just one map, but I’m hopeful I can find more later. It will serve well as a placeholder.

Grand Tetons up! Also, Great Sand Dunes and Biscayne

Grand Teton National Park mapIt maybe have taken a while, but I finally got the Grand Tetons map page finished! So far the Tetons page has the most maps of any on the site, with 37. (Yosemite Maps currently comes in second place with 25.) It sure makes for a long page with lots of scrolling… am thinking maybe I should add navigation links to the tops of long pages? Or maybe that’ll just make it more confusing.

Great Sand Dunes National Park mapI’ve always thought Great Sand Dunes is an underrated park and was happy to get this page up. It’s not necessarily a park that the average visitor will spend lots of time on, but it has some neat variety between the huge dune field and the Sangre de Cristo mountains.

Biscayne National Park mapThe Biscayne National Park map page is a little short at this point, but I’m optimistic I might be able to fill it out later. The official park web site actually wasn’t too helpful, which isn’t surprising; Biscayne has a relatively small staff and not a ton of visitors. (It doesn’t help that it’s mostly a water-based park, making it tough for the average visitor to experience.)